He was born in 1741, a descendant of the Rhode Island equivalent of royalty. The first Benedict Arnold had been one of the colony's founders, and subsequent generations had helped to establish the Arnolds as solid and respected citizens.
We've got a yawl named the Phebe, which is named for a boat in a whaling journal my father and I edited. We keep a copy of the journal on board.
Whaling was the oil business of its day.
There's an ugly civil war side to revolutionary Boston that we don't often talk about and a lot of thuggish, vigilante behavior by groups like the Sons of Liberty.
In my early 20s, I was a big fan of Theodore Dreiser and might be one of the few people on the planet who have voluntarily read all his novels.
'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.
